Getting your Clients onto a Retainer

Having a retainer each month gives you the freeddom to work with your client without having to worry about payments. It means you are getting paid upfront, you will have complete freedom every month and not have to waste your time chasing payment.

For some clients it is an expense upfront and a commitment, you will need to justify it but you can make the deal sweet for everyone.

1. Offer a Discount

By getting an advance payment, offering a small discount to get your client onto a retainer is not a big deal, If your hourly rate is $60 per hour and you are currently working approximately 10 hours per month for your client, you can offer them a retainer of 10 hours per month x $60 with a discount of 10% if they pay upfront. The 10% incentive will be easily crawled back by the less admin, billing and chasing you have to do every month.

2. Free Hours

If you want to keep your hourly rate, you can include an extra 12 hours per year (1 hour per month) for free to sweeten the deal.

Clients are always looking for something worthwhile and offering them free hours, what would be equivalent of almost $720 is a fantastic saving and it will only put you out by one o hour per month.

That single hour will be easily saved from the admin of having to calculate your time every month, timesheets, recording hours, invoicing, waiting for payment, no payment, then chasing then finally getting paid.

3. Priority Service

You will already offer your clients an awesome service but the ones on retainer can take advantage of your “Pulse” response system, I used this with some clients that were on retainers, their emails were answered immediately – no delay and their tasks were actioned, the blistering speed of service set the whole experience apart from when they had no retainer.

They felt like VIPs and they were right, once other clients heard about this level of service, they moved to a retainer and going forward it was easier to get them to commit to another year.